BBC Audio and Music Interactive released a public version of their audio annotator yesterday, entitled ‘Find Listen Label’. The annotator is browser-based and is being launched in collaboration with Radio 4′s “All in the Mind” (listen to episodes of this programme in our archive here).

The annotator works by allowing users registered on the BBC website to attach notes to parts of an audio ‘stream’, and displays those notes in a time-based and synchronised manner along with the media itself, much like our own Project Pad media tools suite. Tristan Ferne has more information on his blog about Find Listen Label, or you can try it yourself.

Coverage from the BBC Backstage blog:

[Backstage Blog] Find Listen Label:

Audio and Music have just launched their Annotatable Audio project. Tristan Ferne has the scoop.

We’ve just launched Find Listen Label, previously known as Annotatable Audio. It’s a tool for BBC Radio listeners to segment and annotate radio programmes on the web – wiki style – creating better navigation within the programme by providing segments or chapters and enhancing the findability of the programme by annotating it with descriptions and tags about the content. We’ve launched this prototype with Radio 4′s “All In The Mind” as a partner programme and it will be up for around 4 weeks before we evaluate how well it has worked.

Have a play…

It will start to become really powerful when/if we launch it across many of our programmes and start to use the generated data in other products and sites, and we have plans to open the data up to backstage.

So what things could you build or do with the data from this project. Answers in the Prototype or Ideas section.

(Via Backstage.bbc.co.uk).

he founder of online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is launching a service offering free tools for people who want to build community websites.

Jimmy Wales has said his company Wikia.com will offer software, storage and network access and that website creators can keep advertising revenue. Wikipedia is built and edited by users and is free for anyone to use.

Great to see someone standing up to the Chinese government – take note Google!

‘The founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia written by its users, has defied the Chinese government by refusing to bow to censorship of politically sensitive entries.

Jimmy Wales, one of the 100 most influential people in the world according to Time magazine, challenged other internet companies, including Google, to justify their claim that they could do more good than harm by co-operating with Beijing…..’

Via the Observer – Read more at http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1869074,00.html

Something along the lines of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail thesis, this page confirms Jimmy Wales‘ contention that Wikipedia, far from being reliant on a nebulous and far-flung posting userbase, is actually much more like a conventional organisation than the revolutionary rhetoric associated with some elements within the Wikipedia community would suggest. New content often comes from the anonymous writers or one-time posters, but the majority of edits come from regulars. And it’s even more skewed than you might expect:

How Wikipedia entries get written:

Cory Doctorow: Aaron Swartz, who is running for the WIkipedia executive, has done some data-crunching using a rented supercomputing cluster, against many Wikipedia entries to determine how Wikipedia entries get written. It turns out that while the majority of edits come from a small group of 500 core editors, the majority of new content is inserted by drive-by, unregistered users whose contributions are then massaged into encolopediahood by the core 500.

Link

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

(Via BoingBoing).

Blogged this piece of Iain’s out of Writely – could not resist – which he has been trying out. Really interesting. Could we blog directly to “Extended” pages which might be more appropriate for the longer texts we write as collaborations?

Grateful to Iain for bringing this to our attention. does it move us towards our objective of “writing on and for the internet”? How do we identify authors? I wrote the para. which starts “That was one of the issues…” – but how would we know that?

Hi guys,
I’m very taken with Writely – upload of a variety of file types is easy, including HTML, Word and Open Office docs. Documents can also be saved in many different formats including XML and PDF. The autosave and revision comparison featues are good. Style and formatting features seem just as good as Word. You can organise your documents using tags. RSS feeds are available for documents, tags and users.

Is this something you think you would use? It’ll be interesting to see how Google incorporate Writely within their existing services.

That was one of the issues I raised with Iain this morning – how will they integrate this? Can anyone add to the list of collaboraters – I have just tried adding my Gmail identity… How do we see edits like this

I’ve created this document to test out the collaboration features – I’m not sure how this will work? Will I be able to edit/delete your comments? How are certain document areas protected?

Graeme I’d like to try posting directly to the new blog using Writely – could you run over the settings with me when you have a minute.

Thanks,
Iain

This is an old link but heh looks interesting!
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2004/07/05/wordpress-12-wiki-integration/

We’ve been looking at possible Wiki solutions for enabling student collaborations next semester – a product which has had a few rave reviews is Writely. It uses a Wiki engine and appears to have excellent functionality; the interface looks nicer and easier to use than some other Wiki software I’ve seen. The good news is that the company has just been purchased by Google, which probably means it’s on the up. The less good news is that although it is free now while it is in Beta, in the future ….
‘Our hope is to have the basic service be free, with some extra features
requiring a reasonable subscription fee*. We will also be charging license fees
to corporations and partners.’

It’s not easy to try out right now because they have temporarily suspended registrations, presumably while they sort out Google branding. But if you have a look at the web site, demo and the FAQ you get an idea of what is possible. I also found an interesting short paper on the use of Writely in a student collaborative learning environment which is worth reading. Any thoughts?

I think it’s also worth looking at Writeboard again (from 37signals, the people who make Basecamp) to compare functionality …. What do we gain/lose with products like these vs. running our own open source Wiki?

Iain